Bankers Heart

This is in the center of A.P. Giannini Plaza.  A.P. Giannini was born in San Jose, California and was the Italian American founder of the Bank of America.  He founded the Bank of Italy in 1904.  The bank was housed in a converted saloon directly across the street from the Columbus Savings & Loan as an institution for the “little fellow”. It was a new bank for the hardworking immigrants other banks would not serve. He offered those ignored customers savings accounts and loans, judging them not by how much money they already had, but by their character.  His role in the 1906 earthquake is stuff of legends, he got the money out of the bank and drove it on a horse drawn wagon to his own home down the peninsula.  This was vital as the city began to come back to life, he had some of the only accessible money after the fire. (others were afraid to open vaults to soon knowing the money in hot vaults could be ruined if they did so).  A.P. had money to start loaning out and getting the economy back on its feet quickly.  His history is one of greatness, and worth reading about if you get a hankering.

This piece is called Transcendence by Masayuki Nagare and is made of 200 tons of black Swedish granite.

Wikipedia tells of Nagare’s life.  “born February 14, 1923, is a modernist Japanese sculptor who has the nickname “Samurai Artist”. In 1923, he was born in Nagasaki, to Kojuro Nakagawa, who established Ritsumeikan University. As a teenager, he lived in several temples in Kyoto where he studied the patterns of rocks, plants and water created by traditional landscape artists. In 1942, he went on to Ritsumeikan University where he studied Shintoism and sword-making, but he left before graduation. Afterwards, he entered the naval forces preliminary school, and experienced the end of the Pacific War as Zero Fighter pilot. After the War, he learned sculpture by self-study while roaming the world. Nagare’s works include “Cloud Fortress” which was destroyed at the World Trade Center.”

He has a website that does have an English Translation page.

This piece was dubbed “The Bankers Heart” by famous San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. When NationsBank acquired BofA in 1998, a joke making the rounds said conquering Chief Executive Officer Hugh McColl Jr. was going to hijack the sculpture to the bank’s home office in Charlotte, N.C. NationsBank adopted the BofA name and took most of its operations but left its “heart” in San Francisco.

This piece was commissioned in 1969 during the construction of the building.